We are working on a Jan van Krimpen Cancelleresca Bastarda Revival, together with Rodrigo Fuenzalida. And we are doing it 'In the open', posting all the betas as we make progress, and encouraging public participation and feedback.

I started this back in November 2011, and then put it to sleep because of the lack of high quality sources.

But something awesome happened:
A very generous and humble Benedictine monk, that have the original metal cut, printed a specimen just for us and sent a high-quality scan. And we like to share it with the world.

Now the project is back to life! We are currently on Beta21.
And, as usual, it will be released under the SIL Open font license.

Those and the Kris's flickr photo were the best we could get.
We will love to have access to even better sources, like photos of the metal punches or original drawings, but sadly we don't so we have to guess a lot of the details.

It's not just me. Rodrigo is also doing a lot of work.
He does the first round during the day and I iterate and refine during the night, and we chat over Skpye to discuss ideas.

Also, playing and writing with a variety of nib pens to try to get a better sense of the flow and the contrast.

We sincerely hope that this can be good revival, and we are putting all our effort to make it as good as possible. But we can't do it alone, we need all the help and feedback from everyone. That's the only way we can improve it.

We also have the previous digital CB revival by Richard Beatty, called Romus (the entire romus family) but it's not of any help, because it lacks all the details we are trying to include in our version, and it's also pretty different from the specimens. In fact, one of the reasons for doing this new revival, was that I was not happy with the one from Richard.

We still have a lot to improve (the spacing in particular) but we are making progress every day.

Not the punches, the sorts. Or even hi-res (at least 2400dpi)
scans of nice kiss-impression prints. Actually, for scanning
metal type you need what I call Platonic-kiss-impression prints,
where the bodies of the letters aren't even solid - all you want
is the outlines. :-)

Exactly what was the best available?
Can he be convinced to provide something better?

If you have enough sample settings you can reverse-
engineer the original spacing. However the process
William describes seems too iterative; I'd use math,
and start with an "nn" you might hopefully find.

But that's assuming you like the original's spacing...
A revival can be faithful in various flavors; since CR
was a metal type, adhering to the original spacing can
potentially be seen as a bit too faithful. You might study
JFP's revival of Sabon (they once produced a highly
revealing booklet about it) to see ways of figuring out
what compromises were originally made and why, in
order to decide what original decisions to over-ride.

It is so delicate that I don't dare to smash it on the scanner, so only scanned this one page at the momment. Enjoy!

Also purchased "Ten Simple Rules for the Spiritual Life"
Believe me, the scanner does not do justice to the beauty of these books. Not even to the brightness and texture of the paper (that can be better appreciated in the first photo on the previous post).

Both were masterfully printed at the Stanbrook Abbey Press.
I'm very happy to see how this beauty was used in real life (Instead of simple specimens). Now we can also study how the spacing works, and keep improving the revival.

Mathieu Lommen (Curator of Graphic Design at the at the Special Collections of the University of Amsterdam) got in touch with us, and sent scans of the Original Drawings, from the Jan van Krimpen Archive, Special Collections, University of Amsterdam.